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NEW YORK (AP) — Before the towers crumbled, before the doomed
people jumped and the smoke billowed and the planes hit, the
collective American memory summoned one fleeting fragment of
beauty: a clear blue sky.
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So many of those who remember that day invoke that detail. Last
week, New York magazine, which has been running a 9/11
“encyclopedia” ahead of the 10th anniversary, added an entry for
“Blue: What everyone would remember first.” It chronicled nearly a
dozen of the ways that Americans recalling 9/11 anchor their looks
back with a reminiscence of blue sky.
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No coincidence that the power of such an image endures. Blue sky is
a canvas of possibility, and optimistic notions of better tomorrows
– futures that deliver endless promise – are fundamental to the
American tradition. In the United States, to “blue-sky” something
can mean visionary, fanciful thinking unbound by the weedy
entanglements of the moment. Off we go into the wild blue
yonder.
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But the years since 9/11 have dealt a gut punch to four centuries
of American optimism. A volley of cataclysmic events – two far-off
wars, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and, for the past four
years, serious economic downturn – has worn down the national
psyche. It’s easy to ask: Is optimism, one of the defining pillars
of the American character, on the wane?
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“Some of the really big challenges we are facing are really
starting to sink in with people,” says Jason Seacat, who teaches
about the psychology of optimism and hope at Western New England
University. “You talk about that can-do spirit that used to exist,
and it still can exist. But what I get a lot of is, `This is such a
huge problem, and there’s really nothing I can do about
it.'”
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Welcome to the rest of the human race, some might say. Europeans,
who can enjoy their fatalism, have been known to poke fun at
American optimism. And why not? You could argue that the virus of
optimism was spread to this continent by supplicants beguiled by
the vision of a land that promised brighter futures – presuming you
left the Old World to pursue them.
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Since the 1600s, when one of America’s first Puritan leaders cast
the society that would become the United States as a “shining city
upon a hill,” the notion that one can will a better future into
existence has been a central thread of the American story. The
Declaration of Independence enshrined as national mythology not
happiness itself, but the pursuit of it – the chasing of a dream
alongside life and liberty as the ultimate expression of
self-definition.
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It took root. This became the nation where getting bigger and
better was a right granted by God, where the Optimists Club was
founded and “The Power of Positive Thinking” became a bestseller,
where you could bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be
sun. “Finish each day and be done with it,” American writer Ralph
Waldo Emerson exhorted. “Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and
serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old
nonsense.”
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Old nonsense, alas, has a way of loitering around and gumming up
the works.
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Last year, as we began a new decade, a Gallup poll found that 34
percent of Americans were pessimistic about the country’s future –
the highest number at the start of a decade since the 1980s began.
Numbers from Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index late last month
were the lowest since March 2009. Most tellingly, perhaps, a
majority of Americans – 55 percent – said this year they found it
unlikely that today’s youth will have better lives than their
parents.
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More anecdotally, when was the last time that popular culture
produced a strong vision of an optimistic American future? We got
those all the time in the mid-20th century, era of the World’s Fair
“Futurama” and promises of jet-packing your way to the office in
the morning. But the Jetsonian view of tomorrow has become quaint,
and today forlorn narratives like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,”
the zombie apocalypse drama “The Walking Dead” and Cormac
McCarthy’s “The Road” dominate the American futurescape.
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In the weeks directly after 9/11, optimism seemed on the rise for a
time. The trumpet had summoned us again, and some people expressed
a renewed sense of purpose. A high-stakes seriousness settled in.
We spun tales of freshly minted heroes, gave blood, held benefits,
told each other that hey, don’t worry, things will get better. A
national coming together and the accompanying resoluteness were, it
seemed, feeding hope.
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“In an odd way, for all its tragedy, 9/11 reinvigorated the sources
of American optimism at a very particular time,” says Peter J.
Kastor, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis. “The
problem now is recapturing that.”
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Today, politicians struggle to project the all-important optimistic
outlook that will help them win elections and govern a cranky
citizenry. Yet optimism is a must-have narrative for any politician
looking to lead. And the most effective among them – the
Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan – have built their
images around optimism. “Morning in America,” Reagan called
it.
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Political consultant Bob Shrum, who wrote Ted Kennedy’s famous and
optimistic speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention (“The
work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream
shall never die”), says successful politicians deploy optimism as a
tool to “expand America’s vision of itself.” The ones who endure,
he says, “are people who help define and enlarge the American
spirit.”
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The “Audacity of Hope” president used the meme Thursday night in
his jobs speech to Congress after cataloguing employment problems
and putting forward his solutions. “We are tougher than the times
that we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been,”
Barack Obama said. “So let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work,
and let’s show the world once again why the United States of
America remains the greatest nation on Earth.”
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Not everyone finds salvation in positive thinking. The cultural
critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an entire book in 2009 on the
country’s excessive optimism. In “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless
Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” she
assessed it this way: “Positivity is not so much our condition or
our mood as it is part of our ideology – the way we explain the
world and think we ought to function within it.”
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Ehrenreich identified an important point: There is a big difference
between unfettered hope and the American brand of optimism. Hope,
she asserts, is an emotion; optimism is “a cognitive stance, a
conscious expectation.”
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And what, after all, is more American than a conscious, supremely
confident expectation that things will turn out OK? That if we
visualize the future, and are simply American enough as we forge
forward, bright tomorrows will happen.
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That may be the central challenge for American optimism at the dawn
of the second decade after 9/11: figuring out how much of the dream
should be about the clear blue sky, and how much should be about
wrestling with the problems that percolate beneath it. A balance,
in effect, between the promise of our tomorrows and the reality of
our todays.
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It’s not like the future is going anywhere, though. It’s been our
comforting companion for too long, and blue-sky dreams have a way
of clawing to the top of any American story. Even after 9/11 and
the uneasy decade that followed it tested the optimism of so many,
that’s the thing about tomorrow: No matter what, it’s still always
a day away.
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—
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EDITOR’S NOTE – Ted Anthony, assistant managing editor for The
Associated Press, writes frequently about American culture. He
covered the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan
and Iraq in 2001-2003. Follow him on Twitter at “text-decoration: none; color: #000066;” href=
“http://twitter.com/anthonyted” target=
“-blank”>http://twitter.com/anthonyted
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—
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Tomorrow: What was news on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 – and what
it told us about the world before.
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